Bandwidth efficient transparent block-code transcoding techniques are known in the art for the transmission of data streams over a communication channel. Popular block-codes used for transmitting signals over an Optical Transport Network (OTN), such as 8 B/10 B and 64 B/66 B commonly used for Ethernet signals, are not bandwidth efficient enough to allow encoded client signals to be carried transparently over a transport network utilizing the ITU-T G.709 transport protocol. While more bandwidth efficient block-codes have been developed that allow a transparent transcoding between the encoded client signal and the more bandwidth efficient codes, the block-codes currently known in the art suffer from several deficiencies.
Block-codes in accordance with the Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) outlined in ITU-T G.7041 transcode a group of eight 8 B/10 B codes into a 64 B/65 B code and ITU-T G.709 extends the G.7041 coding method to transcode eight 64 B/66 B codes into a 512 B/513 B code. However, one disadvantage to using G.7041 and G.709 defined codes is the use of address chaining to identify the locations of the control information within the original data stream, which may result in increased errors at the decoder, since an errored bit in any address in the chain will result in the corruption of multiple bytes after decoding. Additionally, G.709 and G.7041 coding requires that all of the control information be positioned at the beginning of the block, thereby increases the transmission latency at the receiver, which is undesirable.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improved system and method for block-code transcoding that provides reduced latency and is more robust than the block-code encoding methods currently known in the art, thereby providing for more reliable signal transmission and lower error rates.